The Sum of All Fears.pdf - Delta Force

lossomed into the attribute he'd come to associate with a warrior of the Sioux
Nation. His five feet, eight inches of height supported fully two hundred pounds
of lean, hard muscle. His upper arms were the size of some men's upper legs. He
had the waist of a ballerina and the shoulders of an NFL linebacker. He was also
slightly mad, but Marvin Russell did not know that.
Life had not given him or his brother much of a chance. Their father had been an
alcoholic who had worked occasionally and not well as an auto mechanic to
provide money that he had transferred regularly and immediately to the nearest
package store. Marvin's memories of childhood were bitter ones: shame for his
father's nearly perpetual state of inebriation, and shame greater still for what
his mother did while her husband was passed-out drunk in the living room. Food
came from the government dole, after the family had returned from Minnesota to
the reservation. Schooling came from teachers who despaired of accomplishing
anything. His neighborhood had been a scattered collection of government-built
plain block houses that stood like specters in perpetual clouds of blowing
prairie dust. Neither Russell boy had ever owned a baseball glove. Neither had
known a Christmas as much other than a week or two when school was closed. Both
had grown in a vacuum of neglect and learned to fend for themselves at an early
age.
At first this had been a good thing, for self-reliance was the way of their
people, but all children need direction, and direction was something the Russell
parents had been unable to provide. The boys had learned to shoot and hunt
before they learned to read. Often the dinner had been something brought home
with .22-caliber holes in it. Almost as often, they had cooked the meals. Though
not the only poor and neglected youth of their settlement, they had without
doubt been at the bottom, and while some of the local kids had overcome their
backgrounds, the leap from poverty to adequacy had been far too broad for them.
From the time they had begun to drive – well before the legal age – they'd taken
their father's dilapidated pickup a hundred miles or more on clear cool nights
to distant towns where they might obtain some of the things their parents had
been unable to provide. Surprisingly, the first time they'd been caught – by
another Sioux holding a shotgun – they'd taken their whipping manfully and been
sent home with bruises and a lecture. They'd learned from that. From that moment
on, they'd only robbed whites.
In due course, they'd been caught at that, also, red-handed inside a country
store, by a tribal police officer. It was their misfortune that any crime
committed on federal property was a federal case, and further that the new
district court judge was a man with more compassion than perception. A hard
lesson at that point might – or might not – have changed their path, but instead
they'd gotten an administrative dismissal and counseling. A very serious young
lady with a degree from the University of Wisconsin had explained to them over
months that they could never have a beneficial self-image if they lived by
stealing the goods of others. They would have more personal pride if they found
something worthwhile to do. Emerging from that session wondering how the Sioux
Nation had ever allowed itself to be overrun by white idiots, they learned to
plan their crimes more carefully.
But not carefully enough, since the counselor could not have offered them the